By Nathan Windsor

About Nathan Windsor

About Nathan : ProfessionalI was introduced to the blockchain space in 2015 during the Ethereum Homestead release two years ago. I then founded Macroscape, a blockchain consulting company to advise companies on how to do their token launch. Macroscape is currently working with companies in spaces including, AI, hedge fund, film, and digital health. His strength in enrolling others in the blockchain space helps emerging blockchain companies build a community ecosystem.About Nathan: Personal
I grew up in NJ and went to Cornell for Biological Sciences and Music. I then moved to NYC to practice music therapy in nursing homes and play music in the city. I wrote and performed a musical TV show, The Fabulous, a comedy similar to Rocky Horror meets Flight of the Concords, which is now being produced in NYC. I taught myself to code years ago and I have researched, architected, designed, coded, tested and supported too many websites, applications, and platforms to count.

Last week, global emerging music and technology conference, Mondo NYC was hosted in the Williamsburg Hotel with a full day agenda of panel discussions, speed meeting sessions, NY music industry meet-ups and more. Local musician and technologist Nathan Windsor attended and shared his key takeaways from the event.

Disclaimer: I’m a musician and I run a blockchain software company called Macroscape. I moved to NYC in 2006 to play music, wrote a rock opera, and worked as a music therapist. When I started to run out of money, I switched to software development and cryptocurrencies.

Now if you’re not constantly huffing the fumes of crypto-crack like I am every day, you’re probably not familiar with all the totally arcane and useless facts that I know. Luckily, someone compiled all the failed crypto projects in one place for you right here. Like, you probably don’t know that Ripple is a highly centralized database and most of its founders hold huge amounts of it. That hasn’t stopped it from raising an obscene amount of money (the current market cap is $28.38B), and people from bringing class action lawsuits against the company. As McCartney sang “will you walk away from a fool and his money?” You also probably don’t know that EOS took out ads for its ICO in Times Square, which violated US securities laws.

EOS and Ripple fit into the bucket of projects that have reached what I call “terminal financial escape velocity”: they’ve raised so much money that they can just pay off whatever bills the authorities throw at them. “Ah, who cares,” they probably think. “They’ll sue us in whatever jurisdiction, then we’ll confuse them with nuanced jargon, and pay whatever fee they want us to pay.” (think the FAANG paradigm…)

Getting back to the event of this article, Mondo NYC was created by Joanne Abbot Green and Bobby Haber, who were the also the founders of CMJ. Along with Northside Festival and SXSW, Mondo is another festival working to give musicians the exposure, network, and tools to make a living. Having attended many of these industry festivals over the years, I often come away with a feeling of “ok, so now what?”

I spent three hours listening to panel discussions on blockchain and the future of the music industry and while we are getting better at crafting tech solutions that “cut out the middleman”, we still have a long way to go. Many times in the age of the internet, we solve one problem and then create a whole slew of new ones.

Here are the dark secrets of the music and blockchain industries which no one wants to tell you, and which are symptomatic of the much larger issue of global wealth disparity and the coming AI technological revolution.

1.) Our culture does not understand how to use units of accounting to value the work of people who create “art” (music, performance, visual art). While we all believe the story that art is “valuable” or “unique” we simply don’t know how to assign these things value. That does not mean that we can’t assign it value, it means we don’t. Yet. The same applies to our other valuable assets like data and attention, which is why we give them away for free cat videos.

Greenpointers waiting in line to vote in November 2016. Photo: Julia Moak

Editor’s Note: Tomorrow, Thursday September 13th is our state’s Primary Election day. We will be voting for candidates for Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General and Civil Court Judge. As this Brooklyn Daily Eagle article put it, “For the average voter, picking a judge can often be the hardest decision on the ballot as there is often a lack of information available about candidates as compared to races for executives and legislators.” Greenpoint resident and op-ed contributor Nathan Windsor became frustrated after attempting to find out more information about the judges on the ballot.

The floor was bustling at the World’s Fair Nano at the Brooklyn Expo Center. Photo by Jessica Fejos

“The future is here — it’s just not very evenly distributed,” wrote the venerated sci-fi writer, William Gibson.

That’s the key takeaway from the World’s Fair Nano that took place Sept 16-17 at the Brooklyn Expo Center here in Greenpoint. Emerging tech is like a nerd’s theme park: people are willing to pay $40-300 for tickets and then stand in line for 50 minutes to spend four minutes in a VR world. Bonkers.

The World’s Fair Nano is an offshoot of the World’s Fair, first originating in France in 1844. Each fair usually showcased “innovations of the future” which inspired the fair-goers to imagine the possibilities of life in the upcoming decades, and the Nano was no different. Continue reading →